


Goodnight, Travel Well

by FirebirdSong



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Dark Character, Delirium, Drug Abuse, M/M, Madness, Suicidal Thoughts, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 06:30:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2099100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirebirdSong/pseuds/FirebirdSong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilson stepped way ahead the floor. His mind was way ahead of his skull. The only thing fully there was his presence, able to take the room over in that moment. All it meant, all it had built and all it had destroyed; it all coexisted, consuming the place to its top discreetly and powerfully, like carbon monoxide.</p><p> “I was expecting you'd be here.” His voice was a hoarse echo, also too far away. “I even think it took too long.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goodnight, Travel Well

**Author's Note:**

> \- Roleplay Adaptation. 
> 
> \- English is not the authors' native language. 
> 
> \- Check the tags (and believe them). It is quite a dark fic.
> 
> \- It's inspired by Goodnight, Travel Well - The Killers (with a slight reference to Nine Crimes - Damien Rice)

Lisa Deacon, 46, the first death that caught his attention.

A patient in common. The tumor in her breast had nothing to do with her illness, caused by a stroke, but it was advanced enough to cause her death. She wasn't his patient anymore; still, House felt heavy.

Wilson, on the other hand, acted oddly. He looked hurt and sad, as expected, but there was something strange in his lips.

 As if he was on the edge of smiling. 

Seven weeks later, House was in the morgue, with his head in his hands.

 A corpse lied on the table, and there was nothing left for it. It had once been a person, it had lived, and then, after death, it had proven him right. Everything was ended for Michael Pratt, 38, whose bone cancer had been treated by Dr. James Wilson, and unfortunately died after some hours of excruciating pain.

 Not because of the cancer. Morphine overdose.

 Just like the last eight Wilson's ex-patients.

 House had to accept it, but reason was fighting against reason. The evidences were clear, he couldn't deny it any longer. But how could it be possible? In what world? How did it begin, and when? "How come I didn't see it?" He didn't know what to do. His whole world has crashed upon him and he struggled to remain whole beneath the ruins. 

Sighing, with his face hidden in his hands, he tried to understand. The room felt colder than it ever did. 

The door opened silently, but Wilson was already aware that House had listened to him. More as if he had heard each one of his heartbeats. But they weren't racing. Wilson stepped way ahead the floor. His mind was way ahead of his skull. The only thing fully there was his presence, able to take the room over in that moment. All it meant, all it had built and all it had destroyed; it all coexisted, consuming the place to its top discreetly and powerfully, like carbon monoxide. 

“I was expecting you'd be here.” His voice was a hoarse echo, also too far away. “I even think it took too long.” The door being locked made a huge, metallic sound in the wide room, as if echoing in every single shadow, traveling through each molecule of that formaldehyde-filled air. “But, I mean... life. You never cared about life at all.” 

That sound stabbed House’s stomach mercilessly as the fear shot adrenalin to his brain, and he got up.Pure survival instinct, something that was ironic for someone who killed himself a little every day with the pills as the pain in his leg increased. He couldn't demonstrate fear. He had to act naturally, as if... 

 _God, what is happening?_ Did he really think Wilson could do him any harm? But something had happened, and it changed everything. 

 He straightened his position and faced Wilson looking for a physical sign of that changing. “I care about life, I thought you of all the people would be able to tell. After all, we know each other so well... Or so I thought." Taking two steps to his side, away from the table, he went on. "I don't care about death, but what it leaves behind. Tell me, Wilson... After all these deaths, what's left of you? Are you still here?” 

Walking in, Wilson had his hands on the pockets of his trousers. His eyes crossed House and caught him for one second, much as if it has just seen a shadow that shouldn't be there, but that disappeared in the moment after. He laughed acidly. 

“What death leaves behind, you say. Tell me, _you_ , any name of your last dead patient's relatives.” His laughter closed in an expression of contempt. “I know the name of theirs. Each sibling, children, parent, spouse, even cousin or friend. So don't tell me about what death leaves behind.” He clenched his teeth and the next sentence went out between them. "Don't tell _me_ , when I have death growing inside my guts.” 

A punch in his stomach. It was exactly like that for House, every single time it was mentioned. "I wasn't speaking of natural death. I was thinking of something a bit more elaborated. Something that required a bit of effort.” Another kind of fear took over him when Wilson said his words. Those were words from a man out of his mind. "Is it metastasized already? I hope it isn't just one of your tantrums about how you don't want to go through chemo. It's been a tough day and I feel a bit high and low at the same time. Things become a bit blurred when you realize you've woken up in a different world instead of your own.” 

Wilson was really close by then, but House could tell that his eyes were far away. They wandered mindlessly to the blades and trays and to the lifeless skin. 

“If I'm ill? Nah, just that C word, you know.” He shrugged, and his attempt of a sarcasm were the depiction of madness, though it lasted for one second before he looked dangerously sane again. “Just like all the corpses you were able to open up, and those ones before that have been buried by their families already. I have never put a tumor inside their bodies. And I'm not ill. I'm not sick. I gave up all my hope, _all of it_ , and I am seeing clearer.” His lips had small spasms once again, like he could smirk, but he didn't. Instead, he just stepped forward, nearer. “So tell me what I have done, House. Out loud.”

 “This is stupid. You're not yourself.” House closed his eyes, hoping it was a nightmare, hoping his mind was just playing tricks on him, making him see things where they weren't.

 He had never wanted madness so much, because he could accept being mad - but not being wrong about his best friend flirting with death and giving her presents before giving himself.  "Cut your crap, Wilson, you know better than anyone that it's treatable. You're _not_ dying.” It sounded more like an order than a statement, as if he could make Wilson promise that. His words sounded disconnected to his own ears, dancing in the cold air.

 “Would you cry, House?” In response, Wilson smiled, though his eyes were filled with blank defiance. “I've never seen you cry, not once. Would you cry if I died? Like Lisa's husband cried, like Jessica's daughter, would you?”

 “Don't ask these stupid questions. I've already told you, if you die I'm alone.” It was hard to look at those eyes, glimmering so unnaturaly. “I can't lose you. I don't want to. I won't watch you die.” House unconsciously started to press the scar on his leg. “Why would you care if I cried or not? One day, I'd stop crying like all these people you've mentioned did, for better or for worse. Tears are worth nothing, Wilson.”

 “Exactly.” Wilson's smile widened. “ _Exactly_.” He repeated, slower, pausing carefully the syllables. “I know you end up understanding me, wanting it or not. Tears are worth nothing. They're just side effects." He finally stared at House directly. "You know what life is? Postponing the unavoidable. And you know what postponing brings? Anguish. That's what you are doomed to go through. Anguish. Pain, endless pain. They begged me, one way or another. They just wanted to get it over with. Lisa, you remember Lisa.” His face twisted and his lips trembled. “She was screaming her lungs out."

 “She was in pain. Pain makes us do stupid things, like wanting to die. So does the fear of pain. What are dead people doing now? Nothing. Because they are nothing.” House didn't want that conversation, not even a bit. But he wanted to _understand,_ and that will was stronger in him. “So Lisa was the first one you ‘helped’. At least the one closer to you when you were hit by the bolt of truth. The old proximity problem and something else. _‘Doing to others as I wish to be done to me’_? Is that it?"

 “Not quite.” Wilson didn't know why, but he wanted to get closer. Probably the same addictive feeling that had possessed him lately, twisting and transforming him. The bitterness that wouldn't ever be washed off his tongue. The first thought when he woke up and the last when he was going to sleep. 

The countdown stopped having meaning.

Power. Relief. Fear. Life on his fingers. It was all about this now. 

“Have you ever had this feeling that everything on life hangs by a thread, and that all it takes for countless lives to be ruined is that someone gets to cut it? And though everyone has the scissor in their hands, getting closer and closer to lose it and cut the nearest thread off, they never do. No one ever does. They stay still. We all stay still until the day we stay still forever. So no, it wasn't anything like it. I got to push the plunger, and it was more like...” he inched his face towards House's, speaking slowly though poignantly, lowering his voice. “ _Shut. Up._ You are going to die, and there's nothing good you'll do from here to there. You are just someone else's tears. You are the nightmares on your doctor's head. You are living and being pain, every single day, people put down dogs and we turn off by-passes every day for the same reason and talk about sacrifice.” He got even closer, at the edge of possible to still look at House's entire face while talking grievously, hard features. “So stop _fucking screaming_.”

The face House knew so well was replaced by a blank mask that could smile or weep if necessary, a twisted copy of James Wilson. It could be beautiful in the way shards of broken crystal all over the floor are, but it would never be as beautiful as when it was a whole.

It would certainly never be whole again.

He could see himself writing in the white board, trying to come to a differential for that man in front of him. Wilson was close enough to kiss him if so he wished, but he wasn't there anymore. He could hear the voices of each one of his past crew members giving him the news ‘ _He didn't make it. We're sorry’_. He shook his head to send them away. He wasn't losing his mind too, even if he wanted to believe so. 

Those brown eyes, always so warm, wore some euphoric eagerness that burned but didn't produce heat. The cold lights of the morgue reflected in that surface. “You're talking reasonably, but you don't make sense. The man who encouraged me to fight my addiction and endure the pain would never say these words. He cried himself to sleep when he lost a patient. He gave all he could to help, he never gave up hoping. So this is you when you're hopeless? I understand. These people would die anyway, you ended their pain. I don't know any of these patients' relatives names, but their deaths left something behind for you. Something that changed you. You're out of your mind, James, can't you see? You're saying words that are not yours.”

 Each breath echoed in the air like the respiration inside a plastic bag. Wilson was under House's shadow, and his eyes seemed not to focus on anything on the wall behind “I bet doctors get off on playing with life. You are the greatest example. But for you, death is defeat. I'm only on the other side of the game now." He stared at House, waiting for his reaction, a half grin in the pleased twist of his features telling he was savoring it. “Maybe I always felt helpless and that worthless piece of man tried so hard to make his life meaningful for people, but all he knew was defeat. Maybe everything he did was fated to die, and that's so true that he was fated to die.” his grin completed itself “What if I liked it?”

The way he said it, throatily, growling low within seemingly breathless pauses, could be even hypnotic or seductive, if it weren't so perfectly lurid. Like the shine of a perfect scarlet painting that reveals itself to be human blood. “What if I always liked to watch them dying, but I just felt too guilty all my life to admit it, and that's why I suffered? Stop fooling yourself. As you always say, _people don't change_.” He stopped. There, Wilson could look inside House's eyes as if there was nothing to be seen. “They just become more of what they really are.”

House couldn't let those words get inside his brain, couldn't give them the chance to make sense. So he concentrated on Wilson's eyes, so far away from him, as if barely acknowledging his presence on that room.

Could it be that a tumor caused the personality change? But if it was so, it could be too late to do anything. He was too many days delayed. The only mental illness in Wilson’s family, besides depression, was his brother's schizophrenia but it was absurd to consider something like that, he would have seen the signs long before. All his years diagnosing people and nothing seemed to fit entirely, he was missing things. A brain tumor that affected the personality but not the movements or speech; he couldn't remember if he ever treated something like that. That was his best guess - a shot in the dark. 

“So many maybes and what ifs. Are you trying to convince me I've been wrong about you all this time? Fine. We can continue this talking after you start the chemo. People don't change, it doesn't mean they can't change their behavior under external influences. Pain, fear of pain, remember? Things change and we try to find a way to deal with them. You just thought too much about everything and ended up with a rational but wrong conclusion.”

When it was Wilson's cue to answer, he felt House's eyes shooting him directly, fiercely, but remained silent. The attentive expression on his face was nearly as of commiseration. He had his right hand on his pocket. 

“You look so skeptical, but I can see now, you're hopeful. You still try to see something in here that's worth living for, because anything is better than nothing, right? But look what's left for you.” Wilson reached out for House's cane, on the edge of the silver table, beside the corpse. The movement was really calm, and it was a shivery steadiness; he was in himself a cruel logic in his indefectibly mad reason. “I'll not go through chemo. I am also tired of you telling me what to do and why to do.” His next gesture seemed clearly that he'd peacefully hand the cane to House. It was yet too quick, though. House must have been too dazed inside his thoughts. “I'll not go anywhere, and neither will you.”

 Within the sentence, Wilson hit House's injured leg with the wood mercilessly. The loudest noise in the room, subsequently, was the cane being left on the floor; because Wilson stopped any attempt of screaming placing a wet cloth by his face, on his nose and mouth. Such a calculated movement. It was uncanny how coordinated on it he was able to be, but there was an inadmissible plain motive for this: You get better after eight times.

 The pain was blunt, unforgiving. House’s first reaction would be screaming, but it seemed Wilson had it all planned from the moment he locked the door. The strong smell of chloroform invaded his nostrils and burnt his throat.

How stupid his body could be, taking deeper breaths when he was in such situation. Every movement hurt, but he couldn't help trying to escape. Wilson held his hand before it reached one of the sharp blades over the table. When he was almost passing out, the cloth was removed from his face, and he was laid on the floor.

Anything could happen. He was helpless, in pain, locked in a morgue. If it was anyone else, he'd have tried to escape earlier. Blind, from the beginning, he had been too slow, too careful.

No, not blind. He had closed his eyes to avoid seeing what he refused to see.

The air was never enough, but soon he was conscious enough to feel the pain again. He didn't notice the tear that ran down his face, and when he tried to talk his voice was barely a whisper. 

“If you're planning to torture me, you must keep in mind that it will bring severe damages to our friendship. Oh, and of course, my body." 

Wilson stared at House's loosen body on the floor and swallowed hard. He crouched, placing his hand under his own coat and pulling off a syringe from a pocket inside. How dangerous was it having it against his ribs, he thought, and how he should have planned it better to fight House's struggling. Then, something else seemed to break, right there, when it was even hard to believe there was anything whole left at all. 

“Torture you? I love you.” He knelt on the floor. As his lips trembled, he clenched his teeth. “I don't want you in pain, haven't you understood this?” Wilson roared, as if he wasn't looking delirious and maniac enough. Lowering his voice to a nearly comprehensive tone, he continued. “I didn't put this pain in there, I only increased it so you can see clearer what I'm talking about. It's just that the loving, caring, weak, James you knew, that couldn't harm anything at all, no matter how necessary, it was a fairy-tale. There isn't such thing as a knight in a shiny armor. I was entirely made of guilt.” Wilson reached out for House's face carefully with his free hand, wiping his tear. "But what I feel for you remains. I am only free now. You should be, too.” his fingers slid to the throat, clearly feeling the throbbing of his racing heartbeats. 

“I can stand the pain. I'm not new to it. I can live with...” It was hard to make himself believe it, though. If Wilson were being his normal worried self, House wouldn't feel the need to pretend he could take it. _I love you._ _I don't want you in pain_. Those words could have warmed his heart anywhere. Wilson always had free pass to his heart, House liking it or not. There, it could only mean one thing. His eyes became empty, and that shade of blue probably has never looked so dull as he accepted the truth that crashed his heart in the silence. “You're going to kill me.” 

Wilson sat on his feet. The image of him flicking the syringe to get rid of air bubbles could be frightening or ironic, but never the comforting image of the oncologist in whose hands there was safety like nowhere else, to whom you could give yourself in completely. If one couldn't trust those brown eyes, he can hardly trust anything else in the world. And it was to this world House had woken up to. 

“If you think so, why are you still laying here?” he lowered his hands with some sort of wickedly patient expression. “You are not tied, I'm not holding you. Do you think there's something interesting to decipher here?” 

“Oh, you know, I just like laying on the morgue's floor once in a while, after my mad best friend hits my injured leg with my cane and kindly makes me inhale some high quality chloroform.” He couldn't really answer it that easily, and that made him anxious. Could it be that he still believed he could bring Wilson back to reason. Maybe he was just weak. Maybe there were a lot of reasons that made him stay still on the floor when all he wanted was to make the pain stop, waiting for someone else to decide his fate. Sighing, he stared into Wilson's eyes, waiting for the right moment to speak. “Maybe I love you too much to just give up on you. I refuse to accept the man I called best friend for so many years was fake, as you say. He's real. He's real and strong, and I know he's somewhere behind all this crap." 

“Even the ones wide awake didn't run, too. I mean metaphorically, once they couldn't actually do it, like you." Wilson smirked for a fraction of a second, as if it was a stupid pun. “I'm not into chasing, I don't like psychological torture, I don't _like_ suffering. I'm not thirsty for blood as you may imagine.” He sat on the floor beside House, as if casually. “I knew you either don't care if you lived or believes I won't do it. From how much I know you, I’d say both. Do you think you can _'save me from myself'_?” the end of the sentence went out mockingly. "It’s too romantic, isn't it? I’m here, House. Let’s both stop talking like I’m not the same person you bailed out the jail, that shared a place with you, bought you an organ. Pain distorted you. I watched it. Not that it changed you, it just bent you. Death did the same to me. Do you think you can bring old Jimmy back for you to step on, just... just imagine I survive this. Imagine no one catches me, what is really unlikely to happen. I'll be dead in three months. There will be no James Wilson at all for you to rescue.”

 “So this is the last gift you'll give me, end my pain and reduce me to that?” House pointed to the body over the table, his hand trembling, not out of fear but something that made his blood run faster. House was struggling to accept it, but in the end, Wilson was right however wrong those words sounded in his voice. He was not denying the insanity that glimmered through Wilson's eyes. Madness has always fascinated him. It just didn't suit James Wilson at all. “Are you really intending to do it?”

 Wilson shook his head calmly.

 “No, you're not a random dying cancerous patient of mine, begging to be shut down. You don't want it this easy, just sleep. You are special, you always have been.” He raised the syringe to House's sight and smiled madly again, the glimmer in his eyes be the shattered pieces left all over. “This is heroin. The first time and the strongest, pure and of high quality, in a concentration that I adequated the most carefully I could to your weight, age and narcotic tolerance. It's not death, it's the closest to paradise one can ever get. It's just that you may, or you may not, have an overdose.” 

House didn't try to hide his shock. That was certainly the least thing he expected to hear from Wilson, not that he's ever expected anything he had said before. "And you say you haven't changed. You tried to make me give up on Vicodin several times in the past years, and now you're holding a syringe with an illegal and extremely addictive drug, willing to inject it in my vein. What if I said no? Would you respect it? Oh, wait. That's a stupid question."

 Wilson looked deliriously satisfied with himself. He knew exactly how to play with House's head, despite saying otherwise. Allowing Wilson to do that was wrong in every way. But he couldn't run. And he started to realize he didn't want to. 

“Oh now look who's being boring. Get over it.” Wilson said it with the provocation tone. The look in House's eyes had changed, like he could finally breath though knowing that air there was toxic and he'd suffocate within minutes. He went on. “I tried so hard to make my life worth the while, I never did anything wrong, I tried to save everyone, but guess what, the world will go on screwed up with or without me. You won't have me as your conscience any longer, and who can know what you'll be able to do without an angel on your shoulder?” He placed his hand on House's chest, by his heart, opening his fingers to feel more. “Perhaps you're right, it’s a stupid question you made. But that's the thing, I made the decisions people don't want to make. They want it, but they can't want it." 

He pushed House back to the floor and leaned on him, with the hand pushing his rib cage and his face aligned to his, making House stay under his relentless sight. “Come on... you know it will be fun." The younger doctor grinned maliciously, narrowing his eyes. 

 “You want to do to me the worst that I could do to myself, to watch me. Or is this just a way to get into my pants? You know, you could have asked me.” House was shivering, but he couldn't tell if it was out of anxiousness or excitement. He didn't want to want what Wilson was offering him, but his reasons not to do it were too weak. 

He couldn't help thinking about Wilson's death and how it would destroy him. He spent years running away from every kind of pain, and it really only seemed to increase. He was old and tired, and it was so tempting. “So you don't know if it will kill me or not. If I overdose, you won't do anything and watch me die. Can you really do it? You say you love me. Will you be able to let me go this easily?" 

He could feel his heart beating against the warm hand, and it had some kind of dark beauty, in fact. They were both about to die in a way or another, and maybe all they had was that moment: Wilson, completely insane, and House, possessed by heroin. Both out of themselves. Together. It sounded like some bad romance for teenagers. It annoyed him terribly that he wanted to give in.

Hearing that known sarcasm made Wilson's smile stick in his face throughout the paragraph. The curiosity was interspersing with the surrender in a tone that rushed inside his veins and arteries like his own shot of adrenalin. Like his own destructive and irresistible drug. His free hand then travelled to House's shoulder and he went upon his body, kneeling with his legs on both sides of House's hips.

“I do love you.” he said intensely, as he was the voice of God speaking the very truth of the Creation and all his madness wasn't but passion, while he placed the hand with the syringe beside House's neck. “You're the last thing that holds me back. You're the last thing I want in here.” The whisper was only theirs to listen. 

The needle, dangerously close to House's throat, was both a threaten for him not to move and a presage, a pronounce of the future. “The only thing harder for me than letting go of my life..." he lowered his head until he leaned his forehead on House's. “is letting go of you.”

That feeling again, piercing his chest. Wilson always had a way of convincing himself to do what he didn't want to. Taking boring cases (that sometimes were in fact interesting), changing his mind when he knew he shouldn't, even having an imaginary night talk with his dead father. Their faces were too close for him to see clearly, and he could feel Wilson's warm breath, life warming up the air. Three months and it would be gone. It was strange how deadlines changed things, making them look more urgent. 

It was hard to say anything. He couldn't say no, he didn't want to say yes. Closing his eyes, he whispered, feeling defeated and heavy. “What are you waiting for, my consent? I can't run away. I can't even move my hand because if you think I'm trying to fight you, the needle is ready. Once you've done it, I won't care about anything else. If I survive, I won't be myself but a slave to my addictions. You want me to say that I trust you and I'm willing to let you do what you want with me? In the past I could. Now I'm not so sure. If I say yes, I'm doing it for you. When Amber was dying, you asked me to risk my life to save her, even knowing I shouldn't and against my will, I've done it, for you. Then you went away. You _resented_ me. Now you want to turn me into a corpse or an addict. Again, you ask me to risk my life because of you. Now tell me, do you really think I should? Or am I being too naive to ask you when you have your own interests in the matter?” 

Wilson retreated his head just a bit and laughed. The first laughter was loud and expelled the air from his lungs; the following few ones were silent, strangled. 

“You are not doing this for me. Your mind had its own interests in it, as always. There, you were guilty, too. Guilt leads everything, because it exists even in someone so unscrupulous like you. What you ever felt about me was because you liked to have the cute puppy licking your hand. I have always been on your hands. I was _yours_. You had always been too far away for me to ever reach you. But, who'd say, hun?” With one movement, he stuck the tip of the needle in House's neck, hearing the loud moan in pain as a response. “Now you are mine. Entirely mine.” 

He stuck it to its middle, but didn't press the plunge. Instead, again, he lowered his head - this time, his lips were beside House's ear. “A person is made of three things: Memories, the moment he's in, and hope. Forget your memories and your hope, and, in my hands, you'll have the best moment one could ever have.” He slid his nose in House's skin, up his stubble, until his mouth was skimming in the other's. “So, enjoy.” 

He whispered against his mouth, and pressed the plunge to let the content of the syringe to get inside the system,  fiercely, mercilessly, soaking everything immediately. “See you on the other side, Greg.” 

Right when the heroin reached his bloodstream, House could feel Wilson kissed his lips - or it could have been an hallucination already. 

The moment it hit his brain, House held Wilson's arms with his hands strongly, to keep him there, as if they weren't fully dressed on the floor but lost in one another; not close to the edge but already falling helplessly into that mixture of euphoria and numbness. He didn't know what he was saying, but he needed to say it, he needed to make his words float in that perfect atmosphere made of relief and pure happiness.

His arms fell to his sides because it was impossible to move, he wasn't strong enough. Or maybe it could be that he turned into stone. A statue of Gregory House in the middle of the hospital, where people would throw away their coffees and cigarettes, and then all the body fluids of the dead, as a revenge. Revenge for what? He couldn't remember.

As the heroin turned into morphine in his brain, he was boneless and comfortable, and it didn't matter... Whatever it was. He loved Wilson, he loved Wilson to death, and why not die right there inside that feeling of completeness, an endless fall into himself? But as he fell, he started to fear the bottom. Wilson was smiling and caressing his face lovingly, and he wanted to just let go and remain that way forever. 

The euphoria seemed to have lasted some couple of weeks, and he wanted to go back to it and throw himself off of that cliff again, even if his heart was sleepy and his brain drowsy. He was about to smash his head against the stones, but wasn't he made of stone a minute ago? 

He felt as if he was made of something viscous and sticky, and his mouth was dry... He needed water, he needed more. Suddenly his words started to make sense for him, and his voice was saying the most reasonable things. "I need... I don't know what I need, I think I need you closer. I'm cold, so fucking cold, but in fact I'm not. I couldn't make it to the other side, but I swear, I swear...” 

He turned his head to the side, leaning his cheek on the floor, looking defeated. “I tried, but the blood wants to stay inside. Isn't it strange that I want it out? But I'm just being dumb, happiness needs it to get to my brain. I need happiness, it's been too long without it already, can you give it to me? I know you can. I'm starting to think I'm just sounding stupid and that why you're laughing. I don't feel like talking anymore, I'm too tired for that.” 

House curled up on the floor, with his eyes closed, trying to find that sensation again, lost inside his senses. Blood started to drip from his nose. 

“I am not... laughing.” Wilson answered, right before a wet hiccough. There was a smile in his face, though; another of his incoherent reactions. He had stayed there all the time, just watching, just listening. He pressed his eyes with his trembling fingers, letting the tears roll to his cheeks, and stared at the empty syringe on the floor. The room was bigger, huge, enormous - its shadows contained every black matter of the whole outer space.

The only darker place was inside him. Wilson felt the black hole that took the place of his heart, and it hurt like it was trying to suck his ribs, his whole skeleton, to inside itself. His other hand was shaking even harder, and when he looked at it, tilting his head down, another couple of tears fell, another thing gravity attracted.

Powerful, then so powerful he couldn't take it. Bright, to the point he blinded himself. Alone, until that company was unbearable.

The shine of the blade of the scalpel he was holding quaked as he trembled. Just one incision; he'd done it so many times. Just a surgery. House wouldn't even feel it. He dragged himself to approach the man laid on the floor, breathing in and easing the eagerness his self had in falling apart and draining from his eyes. “I can't bring you happiness, House. No one can. There's no such thing.” 

He turned House on the floor, for him to lay on his back again. His face started to lose features again, like wax melting. “You're still hopeful. You, of all people.” Wilson swallowed hard, and the subtle sound of the metal of the scalpel being left on the tiles was louder than every one of their puffing breaths. Disarmed, he laid on the floor beside House and placed his head on the other's chest, to hear his heartbeats, and closed his eyes. “Hope you've seen heaven. This is the only way we'll be there.” 

“I've seen it...” His voice was barely a whisper, and then there was only the silence of their breaths. “Better, I've felt it...” House covered Wilson's hand with his own and closed his eyes, wearing the ghost of a smile. “I was happy.”

 His breath became slower as he faded to silence, with only Wilson to hear it. 

It was quiet, then. 

The universe was standing still.

 

 


End file.
